Teaching Matters: In my last column I argued that the financial pressures that force many students to take on excessive part-time work interfere with their academic performance. But that is not the whole picture. Those same pressures also interfere with the student's ability to get involved in another activity that is arguably almost as important in the overall third-level experience - volunteering for a good cause, writes Danny O'Hare

The fact that students are heavily involved in voluntary work - and would be even more so if they had the time - is not widely known among the general public. The average person's picture of a student is of an irresponsible youngster whose spare time is largely devoted to binge drinking, taking drugs and other undesirable activities. That is a false caricature, very far indeed from the reality, and it is one that those who seek to represent students' interests should work more energetically to dispel.

I was reminded of this when, recently, I helped the youth service organisation Suas to interview potential volunteers for their summer programme in Third World countries. The volunteers were college students in their late teens to mid-20s, and their commitment to the programme seemed real and enthusiastic. More than 250 had applied; 150 were short-listed (with some difficulty) and the interview process aimed to rank those to fill 75 places.

What really impressed me were the CVs of the many applicants. The range of volunteer work that they undertake is really tremendous - St Vincent de Paul, reading for young deprived children, various fundraising efforts for good causes . . . The list goes on and on. My own experience when at DCU confirms my view that there are substantial numbers of students who make a very positive contribution to good causes, but that they are too rarely recognised and applauded for their efforts, either on campus or in the media.

When DCU developed its access programme - the Ballymun Initiative in Third-Level Education - many of its elements were implemented with the help and active engagement of students, who supervised study and assisted with tuition in post-primary schools which were funded to open for supervised study in the evenings. The programme could not have succeeded without this voluntary contribution. There was no shortage of volunteers.

Suas is an impressive programme in relation to its objectives in India and in Kenya, but it is even more impressive in that another key objective is to generate a "pro-volunteer/ pro-development" attitude in the returning volunteers, who will eventually become business and public service leaders.

One of the criteria applied in choosing volunteers is their longer-term potential to sustain an active interest in development issues and to influence others similarly. The value of the placement abroad is the beginning of a (hopefully) lifetime commitment to development.

This is important to everyone who regards a third-level education as an altogether broader activity than merely providing a person with the technical qualifications to get and hold down a job. Conceived properly, a third-level education should be as much a preparation for active citizenship as it is for a particular occupation.

Much discussion has taken place on campuses and elsewhere about the desirability of broadening the curricular experience of students. Usually, we think of this in terms of humanities for technologists or science for the arts student - both are desirable to break down the "two cultures" and also to provide students with a broader vision and experience. But not enough academics have yet expanded their vision to include volunteer work and other activities by students in their definition of broadening experiences.

So I was delighted to learn that DCU has recently introduced a module that gives academic recognition to such student activities by including recognised extracurricular achievements in students' transcripts.

This is a unique scheme that formally recognises the work done and learning acquired by students with the students' union, clubs, societies, community work and extra-curricular activity in general. The Uaneen Module is an optional additional module and students can be awarded 2.5, 5 or 7.5 credits that are included in the degree parchment. DCU is the first third-level institution in the Republic to reward extracurricular activity in this way.

The module is the fruit of a number of attempts in recent years, by various sections of the DCU community, to initiate a reward system that would recognise the hard work done by many students in addition to their academic work.

Final-year students from all degree programmes are now invited to register for the Uaneen Module. The module will allow the university to award internationally recognised credits under the European Credit Transfer System for a range of non-academic activities that can range from the sporting, political and creative to the community and social.

This development must be very encouraging to many students. More ways should be found by our third-level institutions to encourage volunteerism, so that it becomes a more dominant activity within the student and graduate body.

But to return to the point I started out with: financial pressures increasingly restrict the amount of time students can spend on this highly desirable activity.

Danny O'Hare is a former president of Dublin City University